Editor’s note: This series is still helpful and practical, but contains some slightly out of date info. It reflects my journey and understanding at the time, which has evolved since then. In essence, I no longer believe the terminology - what I called the ego - is accurate, but the actions and steps are still relevant.

This is Part Two of the series on dealing with the common and most dangerous traps people fall into upon discovering the ego, check out Part One.

Hating and demonising the ego

Another common trap that is vital to avoid is growing to hate the ego, or even worse, demonising it.

When we demonise the ego, we begin thinking that anything to do with the ego is bad for us, and we automatically reject it. We begin living in constant fear – “There’s this deep dark thing inside me, threatening to obscure my inner peace and unconditional love! Argh!” (If you read part one, you’ll recognise this fear as simply more of your ego.)

Knowing the origins of the ego will help us understand and deal with it better – and soothe this fear. So let’s get right into it.

Where did the ego come from? It developed to help us interact with the world. It always has your best interests in mind. Just like many other aspects of our mind and body, it was meant to serve and protect us.

Let’s explain this with another of our mechanisms – the “fight or flight” reflex. This is part of our nervous system that is stimulated when we are presented with something dangerous. It readies us to either fight back or get the hell out. Both options are meant to serve us – they increase the chances of our survival, especially in older and more dangerous times.

But we can easily think of examples when this reflex can hurt us or others. It can cause social slip-ups when we are embarrassed in public, for one. A more extreme example would be a car accident. When we hit a pedestrian, this reflex might cause us to flee the scene even when we don’t mean to (although sometimes we run for other reasons). This leads to much trouble. We could get in legal trouble, suffer from intense guilt, or maybe the victim doesn’t get medical attention and dies.

The ego is a similar mechanism. It is not wrong in itself. It is merely your personality. There is nothing to hate or demonise. In many ways, it is a young child trying to help us. Its youthful innocence, however, means that it is going about it the wrong way. That is when it begins to malfunction and cause us to suffer unnecessarily.

The ego as a baby that never grows up

Let’s go deeper into the ego as a baby. As we discussed in the original ego post, many of the blotches of your ego are born to deal with a new situation. This means that most of them are relatively young. But even the older ones remain the largely the same - childlike and stubborn.

Why do they remain a baby after all these years – after we have matured and learnt and moved on?

We can grow and learn because we can see the big picture. Most blotches don’t filter all of our consciousness. We grow and learn through the spaces the blotches don’t cover. The bigger the blotch, the more the ego has taken over and the more we refuse to change.

The perfect illustration of this is a racist, filled with murderous hatred for other races. She will find it much harder to change than someone who is simply irritated by other races.

But as long as the filter doesn’t cover her entire consciousness, there is still a slim chance.

The egoic blotches themselves can’t change without our consciousness, though – because they are always completely covered by the filters. This makes perfect sense, for they are the filters themselves.

This is why we are often stuck in old patterns and habits that we don’t want any more – there is something that still stubbornly trying to serve and protect us. Like any child, it is stubborn in believing that it knows better than you do. (And yes, even murderous violent racism can be traced back to serving and protecting oneself, no matter how misguided that may seem.)

A personal example

An example might help explain better. I relive old pains and insults compulsively. The worst would be how an ex-girlfriend hurt me, trampled on my pride, and crushed my heart. My ego used to feed these thoughts into my heads every day, replaying her words, her tone of voice and the sneer on her face.

These memories used to hurt me emotionally and physically. I got grumpy. I couldn’t concentrate on what I had to do – be it study or work. I lost sleep. I used to get ulcers and headaches. Seems like the ego is quite an enemy, doesn’t it?

But you know by now it is merely a young child trying to serve and protect me. How so? It constantly made me come up with different ways to react.

I told myself I should have insulted her back, so I could have kept my pride. I should have shouted back at her, so my self-esteem shouldn’t have been crushed. I should have walked away, so my heart remained intact. I fantasised about what would happen if I had reacted that way. I rehearsed it mentally – over and again, even though I would likely never see her again.

While these thoughts were all childish and immature, the ego was trying its best to help me. It wanted me to develop the traits it felt I needed – pride and self-esteem. It wanted me to protect my heart. Like an innocent young child, it doesn’t realise that it is causing me more pain instead.

Does this help put the ego in perspective? This child is a part of you – in some ways, it is yourself as a baby. Would you hate your baby self for trying to help you, would you wish it would go away, would you scream at it and hit it?

The solution

What is the solution? We’ve already discussed in part one how awareness and turning off the mind is one way you can deal with the dysfunctional forms of the ego.

But with this knowledge, perhaps it is easier to understand something I recommended in the original ego post. Reap the benefit of the thought before letting it slide past. Know what it’s trying to tell you, before turning your mind off so it can’t hurt you.

By not feeding the egoic blotches with our thoughts, and recognising it for what it is, we are slowly allowing the blotch to fade.

Loving the ego

There is another step that is beyond the scope of this post, but I shall go into it enough for you to give it a shot.

If the ego is a baby self, doing its best to serve you and protect you, what should you do to it?

You should love it. Where does true, unconditional love come from? From beyond the ego, from your core. Loving it is another way that it can let go of its old patterns – it brings in something from beyond the mind. Hating the ego, on the other hand, makes it worse.

What is the ego trying to do for you? My ego was trying to protect me from getting my heart broken, trying to let me keep my pride. So I showed it images of my new self – I mentally talked to it, I thanked it for what it’s trying to do, and I asked it to help me in a way that was congruent to my new self. I imagined in my head my ego, giving it an appearance, age, and so on. It’s a fantastic meditation, you should try it!

I will fully detail this in an upcoming post on sub-personalities. It’s already half done, and is shaping up to be another piece of Urban Monk dot Net’s flagship content, so please stay tuned for it!

What’s next?

There is one more part to this series, coming up tomorrow. Hopefully I will return to the old series before I interrupted it, unless I get caught up in something else again. This blog parallels my own life and growth, and I’m always discovering something that I can’t wait to share with you guys. So my apologies if it seems like I’m scattered all over the place sometimes, hehe!